Recently, I had the opportunity to present two papers at the Association for the Advancement of Technology in Education (AACE) EdMedia 2011 conference in Lisbon, Portugal.  One of the keynote speakers was Alec Couros who is Professor of Educational Technology and Media at the University of Regina.  Couros’ talk was fascinating for the insights into learning as it is evolving through the utilization of today’s rapidly changing technologies.  However, what particularly interested me was his description of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, I read about the eduMOOC 2011 being hosted by the University of Illinois at Springfield, but at the time of Professor Couros’ keynote address, the course had not started.  However, Couros stimulated my interest in MOOCs by inviting all 900 conference participants to register for a MOOC at his university entitled EC&I 831: Social Media and Education.  According to Couros, the MOOC is free unless you want to take it for academic credit AND the course is dependent upon having the non-credit-seeking students attend.  I attempted to register immediately for Couros’ course, but registrations are closed until August.

Meanwhile, I conducted a little research on MOOCs.  Probably some of the best information can be obtained from YouTube videos assembled by Dave Cormier and his associates at the University of Prince Edward Island.  In “What is a MOOC?,” Cormier argues that a MOOC is a response to a world with information overload.  It is a course with facilitators, materials, and participants.  It is “an event in which people who care about a topic get together to talk about it.”  Participants make connections between ideas, materials, and the facilitators and participants.  The course is part of a way of building learning by creating networks that enable the participants to increase their lifelong learning.  Cormier’s “Success in a MOOC” video provides five key points for participants in a MOOC to keep in mind.  My favorite is the last one, focus.  Given that the idea of the MOOC, according to Cormier, is to facilitate a learning network in a world with information overload, it seems that participating in a MOOC with as many as 3,000 participants might contribute to that overload without a specific focus by the participant.

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This past week, I was invited to participate on a panel at the Education Innovation Summit organized by ASU SkySong (affiliated with Arizona State University) and NeXtAdvisors.  The goal of the summit’s organizers is to “’curate’ an environment that provides the right mix of wild-eyed education entrepreneurs, value added investors, not-for-profit leaders, progressive policy makers, academic thought leaders, and forward leaning foundations, philanthropists and industry executives.”  Based on the attendees that I met as well as my fellow presenters and panelists, I believe that the organizers hit their mark.

Regardless of the speaker or panel topic, if there was an underlying theme, it was “America’s education system is broken.  There are many good ideas.  If we don’t implement them soon, our nation will suffer.”  Whether it was James Shelton, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement, US Department of Education; Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University; Craig Barrett, retired CEO of Intel Corporation; or Joel Klein, EVP at News Corp and former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; all of them delivered the message that we need to reform our education system.  Dr. Crow talked about how the taxpayers of Arizona are paying twice for inadequately prepared high school graduates who have to take remedial math and reading courses when they matriculate in Arizona’s colleges.  Dr. Barrett listed the many policy studies beginning with A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform that identified the problems in our education system and yet little progress has been made.  Joel Klein said that the perverse incentives with K-12 leave little reason for striving for excellence in teaching and learning.

Despite the big issues that need to be solved, I think this nation has the ability to solve many of these problems.  I left the conference committed to not just focusing on higher education issues, but to see if there are ways that members of our institution can contribute to K-12 innovations and improvements as well.  We have reached the stage where it’s no longer appropriate to say that the problems are someone else’s.  Reforming education is all of our responsibilities and cooperation is needed if we want to improve the lives of the generations behind us.

In February, Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, Louis Caldera, and Louis Soares published a research report entitled “Disrupting College:  How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education.”  The report was sponsored by the Center for American Progress and Innosight Institute.  Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor noted for his study of disruptive innovations that influence industries and a few years ago, he and his colleagues penned a book entitled Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns which I reviewed on my blog.

In this report, Christensen and his co-authors (hereafter abbreviated as Christensen) discuss the potential for online education to be a disruptive influence on higher education with a total cost of education per student 40 percent less than the traditional universities (when you combine the state and federal subsidies with the cost of tuition). 

Probably the most relevant parts of Christensen’s paper are the recommendations at the back for policymakers and traditional universities.   Christensen says that state and federal officials must “honestly ask and answer” two questions.  The first question is “is the traditional universities’ business model sustainable?”  Christensen believes that there are few traditional universities that can answer yes to this question, particularly given the evidence that online education represents a scalable disruptive technology.  The second question is “is the primary stewardship to facilitate the best possible postsecondary education and training for the people in their state or whether they are appointed to be caretakers of the specific institutions that have historically provided higher education.”  If the answer is the former, then officials must include the disrupters in their partnership to ensure that as many as possible receive higher education.  If the answer is the latter, then low cost universities must be framed as “competitors and enemies.”

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I had the opportunity to present a paper this week at the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education’s (AACE) E-Learn 2010 conference in Orlando along with Dr. Phil Ice, our Director of Course Design, Research & Development.  The paper, Comprehensive Assessment of Student Retention in Online Learning Environments, originated from research that I conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation at The University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Student retention has been an issue in higher education since the late 1800’s.  Some of the early research in the area began in the 1930’s but the volume of research studies increased substantially in the 1960’s through the present era.  Early research focused on psychological reasons for students to drop out of college but most of the literature since the late 1970’s have focused on sociological issues.

While there are many significant contributors to the research of student retention (William Spady, Alexander Astin,  Vincent Tinto, John M. Braxton, George Kuh, Ernest Pascarella, etc.), Vincent Tinto’s Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition provides a fairly thorough overview of many research studies (note:  the second edition of this book was published in 1994 and new copies are difficult to find).

Tinto is given credit for developing the first theoretical construct of predicting student retention.  Three major areas of his theory involve the importance of the background characteristics of college students, the social integration of students with their college, and the academic integration of students with their professors and programs.  Subsequent research studies have focused on some of these areas and/or attempted to prove or disprove the original construct.  Colleges and universities use some of the studies as the basis for their internal retention research or external explanations of their graduation rate.

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The end of August, first of September represents the start of the traditional fall semester at most colleges and universities.  Freshmen arrive with the excitement of attending a new school and meeting lots of new friends.  Returning students arrive with tales of summer’s experiences and a spirit of renewal for their academic quest.  The campus has been spruced up with summer maintenance projects, some of which have been completed just days, or even hours, before the first freshmen arrived.

As you know, we have no physical classrooms at AMU and APU.  Our campus consists of 15 administrative buildings for our leadership and staff in Charles Town, West Virginia and Manassas, Virginia.  Over 90 percent of our students are not first time freshmen transitioning from high school to college.  Yet, for some reason, many of our adult students choose to come back to college in the fall.  Even though we accommodate the schedules of many working adults with 12 monthly semester starts, the fall is usually a busy time of the year for us.

Hosting a back-to-school picnic or cocktail party is more than a little difficult for a university with students in all 50 states and 100+ countries.  Virtually, I welcome you to our university and hope that you will find our continuing efforts at academic and social integration helpful.  As technology changes and improves, effectively shortening the distance between people, we hope that our abilities to integrate students academically and socially improve as well.

Welcome back and thanks for making us your choice for college.

One rarely has the chance to meet a bona fide visionary.  While Bill Gates and Steve Jobs maybe better known, I would put our founder, James P. Etter (Major, USMC, Ret.) in their illustrious company.  Almost 20 years ago, he had the vision to start a university  to serve thousands of U.S. Military members with relevance, convenience, and affordability at the forefront of his vision.  From a thought at a picnic table driven by Jim Etter’s passion and experience, AMU has grown to a multi-faceted university system serving more than 70,000 students – affordably expanding access to quality, higher education for tens of thousands of Americans.  The curriculum has advanced from a single Master’s degree in Military Studies to 79 degrees ranging from 19 Associates’ to 34 Bachelor’s to 26 Master’s. I would like your help in telling this story.

Over the next year, I would like to interview a few alumni who are willing to share their stories about either the experience of learning at AMU/APU or the opportunities through which they were able to apply the knowledge that they acquired to their career.  If you are an alum and interested in sharing a story or two, please e-mail me at presblog@apus.edu.  Thanks.